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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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OK I'm not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:
The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).
This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)
Its then entirely used up to power the 'person builder' in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)
This would then mean that we can't just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.
This also opens the possibility of the transporter 'missing' if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.
Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)
That's a really cool theory, probably the best I've heard! It's established that there is a limited range, and that transporting during warp is possible, but extremely difficult, have to match the other ships exact speed etc., though they technically aren't traveling faster than light but existing within a warp bubble.
Yeah, that really depends on how they define warp bubbles in the universe then, cause it'd imply the transmission occurs between ships faster than light
Maybe something like the receiving ship trails behind the sending, exact same course just at a distance where light leaving the warp bubble would 'fall' that exact y distance over the time it takes to travel the distance between them in the x distance. It'd also still limit their distance even within their own space bubble
Then it'd make sense cause any course deviation would cause them to 'miss' and again travel through the infinite cosmos as energy.
Thinking about it it also describes those thematic sparkles that happen when they teleport, cause what were seeing is essentially the existence of that person as light.
edit: forgot to say thanks for the comliment! I definitely am gonna have to watch the show(s) soon!
I'd definitely recommend them, though sometimes you'll need to power through some dry bits. All the 90's trek started out rough and only got better.
It's not hard sci-fi, so the technology sometimes works the way the story needs it to work, but generally it's pretty consistent.
They addressed this in startrekng, it was called the 'Hisunberg compensator '
I think that's how a replicator works when you ask it for a dish.
I was also thinking about that, maybe they can do some simple proteins and such enough to trick our taste buds, but something as complicated as a conscious human would be out of their control.
So IG it also describes replicators?
As far as I know that's pretty much on point on how transporters work. There is an episode of TNG where someone was stuck in the energy state and conscious and saw energy beings living there. Of course then there is also the case of the two Rikers which seems to show that copying a person is indeed possible under very specific circumstances (I think there was some interference with exotic energy or something).